Uber is putting 500 data-collecting vehicles on the road this year

Uber on Wednesday unveiled a prototype of a car it plans to use to collect real-world driving data that can be used by its growing list of self-driving vehicle partners like Avride, Waymo and WeRide.

The car is not a radical design. Rather, the Hyundai Ioniq 5 is equipped with an incredible number of sensors on the top and sides, as the company first told TechCrunch in January. The sensor-laden car may not seem particularly groundbreaking, but it represents some major milestones for the company.

This is the first vehicle that Uber has assembled itself (with the help of a partner) since the company sold its self-driving vehicle division to Aurora in 2020. It also represents an advancement for Uber’s new AV Labs division, which launched earlier this year to use sensor-equipped Uber cars to collect data and then share it with its 30-plus self-driving vehicle technology partners.

Uber said on Wednesday that it plans to roll out 500 of its Hyundai electric-equipped vehicles globally this year. This fleet will be able to collect “2 million miles per month of high-resolution data” for robotaxis. Uber expects 50 of these vehicles to be on the road by summer.

The Ioniqs are equipped with 14 cameras, eight solid-state lidar sensors, and nine radars through a partnership with Roush Performance, which will handle the vehicle retrofits. All of this data will be routed through Nvidia’s Dual Drive Thor standalone car computer. Uber appears open to changing this suite of sensors, indicating that it will continue to update it as its partners’ needs evolve.

Uber said its goal is to develop the world’s most geographically diverse training data set specifically geared toward autonomous driving. If successful, this data set will give AV partners a simultaneous 360-degree view that can be used to train self-driving software.

The company already has a head start. Uber told TechCrunch that it collected data from a fleet of thousands of specially equipped vehicles in dozens of cities. The company also obtained data from hundreds of Lucid Air vehicles operating in the United States and Europe over the past two years.

Uber’s AV Labs division is analyzing these two pieces of data and is preparing to collect more through modified Ioniq 5 vehicles, which will be used by its fleet partners.